The Two Joe Bidens: Performer and Policymaker

 

By David K. Shipler 

              Every modern president needs acting skills alongside constructive policies. It’s not enough to run the government and shape the affairs of state.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt mobilized and comforted Americans through his wartime fireside chats on the radio. Harry Truman projected a down-home frankness. Dwight Eisenhower combined a victorious general’s solidarity with a quiet posture of visionary decency. John F. Kennedy used inspirational rhetoric, self-deprecating humor, and the demeanor of royalty. Lyndon Baines Johnson’s flattery and threats worked miracles in Congress to pass civil rights bills, which his display of passionate conviction helped sell to the country at large.

Richard Nixon lacked acting ability, though, and he looked bad on television. Gerald Ford failed to exude strength. Jimmy Carter had a whiny voice and too much honesty about America’s malaise. Ronald Reagan’s acting profession gave him perfect timing, witty quips, and a persuasive illusion of warm sincerity.

George H. W. Bush was a verbal fumbler and gave an impression of much less gravitas than his solid policy credentials warranted. Bill Clinton had a silver tongue and an infectious charm. George W. Bush seemed like a nice guy you could enjoy having a beer with. Barack Obama’s eloquence first carried him into national politics, and then into the White House, where his oratory stirred idealism among large numbers of citizens. Donald Trump’s direct insults, saying aloud the ugly things that many Americans thought, conveyed an image of brutal candor even as he spewed incessant lies, a technique that still mesmerizes millions.

              And now, Joe Biden. He personifies the dissonance between the performative and policy dimensions of the presidency. His approval ratings have plummeted even among voters who agree with him on major issues. The policies he supports don’t seem to matter; his manner of presentation is everything.

He is not a forceful orator, there is no song in his lyrics. He is, perhaps, too calm for the moment, even when he tries to hammer home a point or use sharp language. He fumbles, he digresses, he misspeaks—an ailment left over from his youthful stuttering—and does not excite. At 79, he acts his age and does not project the charismatic strength that many Americans seem to value, especially in a time of tension and hardship. He is often described as “weak.”

              Yet his supposed “weakness” is a mirage. In practice he has been as tough as nails in foreign policy, extremely ambitious domestically, and an activist user of executive power to further a liberal agenda—to the extent that the courts will allow.

How to Evade The Supreme Court

                                                     By David K. Shipler 

              With radical regressives on the Supreme Court trying to drag the country back to the 1700s, the case is being made for ignoring, defying, or deftly evading rulings that clash with the values of modern society. These include abortion, guns, government regulation, voting rights, religion, and affirmative action.

Both legal and illegal approaches are on the horizon. Already, to parry the extremist justices, New York has taken advantage of loopholes in Justice Clarence Thomas’s sloppily written gun-rights opinion. The Democratic governor and legislative majority enacted into law restrictions on concealed-carry licenses that the Court’s majority surely hadn’t imagined, and a list of “sensitive places” where guns would still be prohibited—a much longer list than the Court presumably envisioned.

Similar efforts are underway in progressively-dominated state legislatures to enshrine abortion rights in statutes or amendments to state constitutions following the Supreme Court’s ruling (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization) that overturned Roe v. Wade and magically erased the right to abortion that the Court had earlier found existed implicitly in the United States Constitution.

The game now is going to be to outwit the justices, legally or otherwise. Some methods likely to be tried are in plain view, some under the radar.

 In the blatant category, nearly ninety elected district attorneys across the country announced in a joint statement that they would not prosecute violations of anti-abortion laws in their states. More unspoken refusals can be expected from prosecutors whose offices are already overworked with street crime and don’t want the cruel optics of jailing women and their doctors.

Civil disobedience by clinics willing to risk penalties to oppose the Court might be attempted if brave souls exist. And in some other areas of the law, surreptitious defiance or passive resistance is probable.

For example, after the Supreme Court strikes down race-based affirmative action, as it is certain to do next term in a case involving Harvard University, admissions officers will have little trouble continuing to give preference to minorities in the cloistered discussions that occur when picking the next freshman classes.

Those choices are pretty subjective right now. Grades and test scores have never been the whole story, especially at elite schools, which also look for the unquantifiable attributes of social commitment, community leadership, perceptive self-awareness, and personal success in rising above hardship, among other characteristics. A former Ivy League admissions director once told me that his department valued students who had worked for change, albeit just in their limited circles of school and neighborhood. Absent such qualities, even some class valedictorians with sparkling SAT scores were being rejected.

Since colleges are moving away from requiring or considering SATs, they’ll be able to disguise their racial preferences more easily, if they wish, to create the diverse classes many schools now see as benefitting not only students of color but also whites, who are exposed to the variegated features of the real world they will enter after graduation. University lawyers won’t approve, noted a friend in the legal profession, since they don’t want their clients to get sued. But that risk might not deter the entire generation of admissions officers who have worked hard to recruit bright kids from poor and minority backgrounds. (The Court could leave economic affirmative action intact, allowing colleges to give preference to low-income applicants without considering race.)